To make a big budget movie from a comic book, it used to take a top seller like Superman, Spider-Man or Batman to even get studio execs to take a second look. But that was then and this is now, where just about every remotely known comic character has a feature adaptation in some stage of production at a studio somewhere in Tinseltown.
Enter Jonah Hex. Based on a relatively obscure DC comics creation from the early-‘70s, Hex is part western, part Civil War and part supernatural. Hex himself is a gunslinging vigilante, roaming the wild west protecting the innocent and searching for the man who left him horribly scarred, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), who also shares a mutual hatred for Hex, believing the anti-hero played a part in the death of his son.
Dark Horizons got to travel to the unbearably muggy, buggy swamp-side sets in New Orleans last summer. But we aren’t complaining. The sets were plenty cool enough to make us forget the unpleasant conditions, at least so long as we slathered our bodies in a thick layer of bug spray.
Shortly after arriving on set, we witness acting legend John Malkovich revving up his troops for one of the film’s climactic sequences. Though genteel and quiet off-camera, on-camera Malkovich’s Turnbull is unsettlingly evil, seething with anger (and spittle) as he sets out to finally lay Hex to rest.
Malkovich on his character: “Turnbull was a Southern plantation owner and very wealthy and very powerful. He feels Jonah has caused his son to be killed in a way, so there’s a big sort of revenge factor there. Turnbull also leads a group of kind of marauders, former confederate soldiers. Eventually he hopes to overthrow the government.”
“This is by far the longest sort of ramble in the thing,” Malkovich offers on the scene we just witnessed. “[We wanted to explain] why a bunch of grown men would sort of decide to overthrow the government. Somebody was saying the other day that in Vixburg they first celebrated the fourth of July in 1976, which is holding a bit of a grudge I would say. So we wanted to try and communicate what these men feel, but in a fairly succinct way.”
“This is Turnbull’s boat and he’s going to take it to Washington to blow up the White House,” director Jimmy Heyward explains further. “It’s great. Initially this set piece was in a fort, and I wanted the fort and the giant boat, so I just wrote the boat and here it is, we’re on it. But it’s part of Turnbull’s overall plan, so it’s another thing for Jonah to come and fight him on. But I don’t want to go too deep into it.”
The spectacular set pieces are a sight to behold. The ship where Turnbull made his speech is a life size recreation of the USS Merrimack, 150 long and 50 feet tall. The crew built the massive ship in a mind-boggling three weeks. Walking through the massive vessel, only subtle details at very close inspection reveal that it is merely a giant prop. The production kept the design team busy, who also recreated the 100 foot Monitor ship as well as a host of unique weapons. Some of the guns are based on historical pieces such as the Howitzer while others are merely influenced by the time period, such as the machine guns strapped to the side of the horse and the crossbow pistol you might have seen in the trailer.
Brolin, who portrays the titular Hex, was amongst the first brought aboard the project. After being offered a number of genre projects over the years including the role that ultimately went to Sam Worthington in Terminator Salvation, Brolin says Hex was the first he could really identify with. “[Hex] was still going to be an anti-hero,” says Brolin. “It was still going to bring back sort of this hybrid of spaghetti western genre, you know, the balls of westerns. You’ve got this guy who refuses to die for some reason, whether it be a physical or metaphysical or spiritual, so you can do anything. You can kill off anybody and you can still bring them back because he’s kind of half there and half in reality, you know?”
The actor’s early entry in the project gave him a chance to offer some suggestions for his nemesis, Turnbull. But no one at Warner Bros. was exactly complaining when he mentioned John Malkovich. “To me he’s a genius,” says Brolin of his longtime friend. “I called him about this and it was like, ‘Will you please do this?’” Brolin offers his best Malkovich impression continuing with, “‘Yes, Josh, I‘d like to read it and see how I feel and then I’ll ring you afterwards.’”
“He sent me the script and I read it and met,” says a nonchalant Malkovich. “I met Jimmy out in California on another trip and said, ‘Yeah, great.’”
Heyward, who makes the jump from animation to live action on Hex, has already endured his fair share of skepticism, first for his background and then in reaction to the planned PG-13 rating. But the relaxed Heyward seems to let it all roll off his shoulders. “I was into it [Hex] long ago that I still remember those stories that I loved so much, Hex’s sense of humor and stuff. One of my favorite ones when I was a kid was when Jonah Hex is tied to a stake out in the desert, and Iron Jaws bites off his bonds and then get bitten by a rattlesnake, so Jonah Hex staggers through the desert for miles to get to the town.
When he gets to the town there’s only a [human] doctor, so he kicks in the door and goes up the stairs and the nurse yells, ‘You can’t come in here, you can’t bring a dog in here, this is a people doctor!’ And there’s this guy getting his foot worked on upstairs and he’s like, ‘Take that thing outside and put a bullet in his brain! It’s a stupid dog!’ So Jonah Hex opens the window and grabs the guy getting his foot worked on and throws him out the window to his death and then goes, ‘Doc, you’ve gotta fix my dog!’”
And in regards to the PG-13 rating? “I’m certainly not writing or directing anything for the MPAA,” says Heyward. “It’s more important nailing down Jonah Hex and getting his character right and his feud with Turnbull. “To me, an intense movie can be Taken, it can be The Dark Night or it can be some of my favorite movies. Even if I look at Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is one of my favorite movies, the level of violence you actually see on screen [isn’t that much].”
For Brolin, the most difficult part of the performance is simply enunciating through the heavy prosthetics encumbering the right side of his face. During the film’s many intense action scenes, the getup makes breathing especially tricky. “I just slobber a lot,” says Brolin, who admits that the makeup is worse than he’d imagined. “It sucks man,” laughs Brolin out of half his face. “I’ve gotten used to it now because we have different ones I use for different times, so more action stuff I can talk better now than I can usually talk.”
“We didn’t want to do the CGI thing because of a certain movie [where] it was extremely distracting for me, personally. I said we have to go practical with this.” But the gruelling process has left Brolin unsure of going through it all again should a sequel come around. “I do have hesitation, honestly. We’re half-way through it now and I’m like never again, never again.”
But Heyward doesn’t seem to worried. He’s happy with the work they’ve done and eager to let fans be the judge, though he admits he has thought of other Hex story lines. “This is the prequel-ogy I’m doing right now,” jokes Heyward. “And then we’ll do the trilogy. No, I mean, I have stories to the moon.”
Jonah Hex opens in theaters nationwide June 18th, 2010.
